164 Bailey, In Memoriam: Olive Thome Miller. [April 



imaginative child, and described entertainingly in one of Mrs. 

 Miller's delightful and in this case largely autobiographical child 

 stories, 'What Happened to Barbara.' In Ohio she spent five 

 years in a small college town where she attended private schools, 

 among them one of the Select Schools of that generation, with an 

 enrollment of some forty or fifty girls. At the age of nine, as she 

 says, she "grappled with the problems of Watts on the Mind!" 

 To offset the dreariness of such work, she and half a dozen of her 

 intimate friends formed a secret society for writing stories, two 

 members of the circle afterwards becoming well known writers. 

 For writing and reading even then were her greatest pleasures. 

 The strongest influence in her young life, she tells us, was from 

 books. " Loving them above everything, adoring the very odor of a 

 freshly printed volume, and regarding a library as nearest heaven 

 of any spot on earth, she devoured everything she could lay her 

 hands upon." As she grew older the shyness from which she had 

 always suffered increased painfully, and coupled with a morbid 

 sensitiveness as to what she considered her personal defects made 

 people a terror to her; but solitary and reticent, she had the 

 writer's passion for self expression and it is easy to understand her 

 when she says, " To shut myself up where no one could see me, and 

 speak with my pen, was my greatest happiness." 



In 1854, she married Watts Todd Miller, like herself a member 

 of a well known family of northern New York, and in her conscien- 

 tious effort to be a model wife and to master domestic arts to which 

 she had never been trained, she sacrificed herself unnecessarily. 

 " Many years 1 denied myself the joy of my life — the use of my 

 pen," she tells us, "and it was not until my children were well out 

 of the nursery that 1 grew wise enough to return to it." 



The history of the vicissitudes of her literary life is at once 

 touching and enlightening. Full of ardor to reform the world, to 

 prevent needless unhappiness and to set people on the right path, 

 her first literary attempt was the essay, but as she expressed it, 

 " the editorial world did not seem to be suffering for any effusions 

 of mine," and her manuscripts were so systematically returned 

 that she was about giving up, concluding during very black days 

 that she had mistaken her calling; when a practical friend gave her 

 * a new point of view. What did the public care for the opinions of 



